TSOT Re-writes Three PHP Apps in Rails, in Four Months

Company TSOT, Inc.
Client TSOT, Inc.
Main features Ruby on Rails
 
Excerpt

TSOT moved from ASP to PHP and is now using Ruby on Rails to handle more than 270K+ page views per month. Find out how they ultimately selected Ruby on Rails and rewrote their sites in only four months.

Questions from Robert Dempsey of Rails For All.
Study

TSOT owns and manages three online applications called FraternityLive, SororityLive and FacultyLive. These applications help chapters around North America stay organized and stay connected. Chapters that use FraternityLive have higher participation rates and greater involvement within their community. Multiple networks of chapters, National Fraternities, and individual campuses can now interact and play together, while retaining the privacy that is necessary for your organization.

What is the target market of TSOT?

Fraternities and Sororities across North America.

Before choosing Ruby on Rails, what other programming languages and web frameworks did TSOT consider?

Version 1.0 was built in ASP, 2.0 built in PHP, o ur application is now in v3.0 built with ROR.

What were the main considerations when deciding upon the platform for TSOT? What were you looking for?

Stability, scalability and speed.

What benefits do you get from using Ruby on Rails?

We’ve managed to pull some of the top talent from Toronto by choosing a brand new framework. This has also been a burden on us as there are not that many experienced Rails developers in Toronto. Also building the application in four months with one developer would only be possible with Ruby on Rails. No other language/framework would have allowed me to do what I did in four months.

Are you using any other programming languages or web frameworks for your site?

We are using a little bit of PHP. We bought a script for about $100 vs us wasting time and writing it ourselves.

How long has the site been up, and what kind of traffic are you handling?

Our site launched January 28th, 2007. We are seeing approx 270k page views a month.

Business are concerned about the scalability of Rails. How is TSOT addressing those concerns?

We are running multiple mongrel processes which allows us to handle more than one request at a time.

Go back to the list